Employees have different roles in customer service
Judy Johnson
The Communicator

Understanding the restaurant industry is not as complicated or easy as it looks. Sure, customers understand how it is supposed to work, they come in expect to be seated, served and satisfied with their food in a timely manner. But what they don’t see is what lies behind the doors to the back of the house.

The first responsibility for a manager is to take care of the guest first, and then comes the employees. This seems backwards because in order to take care of the guest a restaurant needs good employees that have been trained properly. Finding good employees is a difficult job because some people are experts on giving a good interview but when it boils down to it, they have no clue what the jobs entail and most have no desire to learn.

Society looks at the restaurant industry as being the career for those that either did not perform well in high school or did not get into college or as a job to get through college. These scenarios are completely bogus. Yes, a lot of college kids do work in restaurants but that is mainly because this industry is willing to work around students’ class times.

There are a lot of people that are lifers in this industry but that doesn’t mean all of them couldn’t go to college and they are not smart. They want this career. If these people did not exist there wouldn’t be restaurants available to feed the customers.

Training the employees is the next most important thing a manager can do. With properly trained employees, the restaurant runs smoothly and they know exactly what to do when disasters occur. Such as how to talk to angry customers, how to put out a fire in the kitchen and what to do if a fellow employee or customer has a medical issue.

Without this training the restaurant is filled with uninformed employees running around doing nothing and getting paid to be a pain in the ass to the other employees that are trying to do their job. This chaos has the butterfly effect straight down to the customers not getting served, food tasting and looking like crap and not having a clean restaurant to be in for the next 20 minutes or so.

Then comes the business aspect of a manager’s job. After having employees trained properly the manager can then concentrate on fulfilling their actual job, the ordering, assigning cleaning projects, payroll, sales projections, hiring and firing, maintaining health standards, and other office paperwork that can vary from restaurant to restaurant.

These may be little projects that are easy to do but with interruptions of filling in for people that called in, being short staffed, or flat out not being prepared for a busy shift throws all these things on the back burner meaning that they will be rushed to get done and a few things will be missed on the order making it unavailable to the customers.

In the eyes of the customers, this stuff just magically happens unless they have been through a restaurant job. Usually the ones that have display patience and understanding and do not mind their food taking a bit longer than it should or the server not be as friendly as they should. Those customers that have no idea what is going on need to take a step back and try looking at it from the employee’s eyes. Yes, the jobs are easy sometimes but when ten tables come in at once, maybe show a little more consideration to the employees if they are running around trying to get every guest as soon as they possibly can, they are only human.

You can contact the writer at staffwriter@spokanefalls.edu